Africa presents an exciting opportunity in the electromobility space. Africa’s low motorization levels present an opportunity for another leapfrog event, like seen previously in the telecommunications industry.
The first batch of Solar Taxi’s 10 Cherry Tiggo 3xe 480 EV SUVs have arrived in Ghana, and customers who had pre-ordered, as well as those who have signed expressions of interest, are now enjoying the first round of test drives before deliveries start in September.
A potential bottleneck could come quite soon on the used EV supply side. Thanks to Japanese OEM’s love of mild hybrids and their quest to prolong the ICE age as long as possible, sales of EVs in Japan have been very disappointing. Sales have been so poor that the market share of EVs in Japan was recently just under 1%.
Even counting used vehicles, the majority of African countries still have very low levels of motorization compared to countries in the developed world. Only a handful of countries have motorization rates above 100 vehicles per 1,000 people.
We continue with our push to show that driving electric in Africa can be a whole lot cheaper than driving ICE. How cheap? In some cases, driving electric is as good as driving for free thanks some really cheap residential electricity tariffs in several countries.
Marathon Motor Engineering, a joint venture between Hyundai Motor Company and Olympic Champion Haile Gebrselassie, has started assembling the all-electric Hyundai Ioniq in Ethiopia.
Getting to a net-zero-carbon energy system is essential. It will be a major effort, one that requires significant investment in new low-carbon infrastructure, from renewable power plants to electric vehicles, efficient appliances and better constructed buildings. While very few countries are on track, China, Costa Rica, Denmark, Ethiopia and the United Kingdom are further along than many others.
Too much cleantech news is a good thing, but it sometimes means I need to stuff a bunch of big stories into one article. Following some roundups of autonomous driving news and battery & EV charging news, here’s one more roundup of some cool cleantech stories no one wanted to take and write full pieces about. This one is 100% focused on solar power.
Ethiopia says it planted 350 million trees in one day last week as part of its Green Legacy program. But should it be building wind farms instead?
Hydropower has great attractions for Africa. First like coal, nuclear, hydropower, and geothermal are base load power. Except for South Africa, which is highly dependent on coal and its two nuclear power plants, there are no other nuclear power plants in Africa and very few coal plants. So along with geothermal power in Kenya, hydropower is the main source of baseload power.
